Apple’s New Night Shift Feature for iOS Shifts The Colors on the iPhone Screen to Stop Ruining Your Sleep

There has been a lot of talk lately about how exposure to blue light from your phone, laptop, or iPad can ruin your sleep. Now, Apple is building a function into iOS 9.3 called Night Shift, which will shift the color of the iPhone and iPad screens to cut out blue light.

The mechanism seems to be based on the idea that “blue” light tricks our brain into thinking that it’s daytime by emulating sunlight. By turning down the color balance and making things appear “warmer,” it will more closely emulate tungsten light, which our brains recognize as artificial.

I have a feeling a lot of photography-oriented folks will be turning this feature off as it kind of defeats the purpose of looking at photos on devices all together. In fact, it’s actually a little troubling to think that some people will come across my work and all the color correction have done has been thrown out in the name of eliminating blue light.

It’s obviously adjustable, but the function is tuned to work with sunset, so in the winter hours like this, it would presumably kick in starting in the late afternoon. That leaves a lot of browsing time with out of the ordinary colors.